Put another way, the purpose of signaling isn’t so nobody will give you crap. It’s so somebody will help you accomplish your goals.
People will give you crap, especially if they can get paid to do so. See gossip journalists, for instance. They are not paid to give boring and unsuccessful people crap; they are paid to give interesting and successful people crap.
Your last para would imply that not getting crap from gossip journalists means you are not interesting or successful. Eliezer/MIRI gets almost no press. Are you sure that’s what you meant?
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional “Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.”. Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.
Put another way, the purpose of signaling isn’t so nobody will give you crap. It’s so somebody will help you accomplish your goals.
People will give you crap, especially if they can get paid to do so. See gossip journalists, for instance. They are not paid to give boring and unsuccessful people crap; they are paid to give interesting and successful people crap.
Your last para would imply that not getting crap from gossip journalists means you are not interesting or successful. Eliezer/MIRI gets almost no press. Are you sure that’s what you meant?
Eliezer gets a lot more press than I do, which is just fine with me.
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional “Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.”. Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.
The discussion about mean vs variance in this post may be relevant.